1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of emotive intelligence in electronic applications. More particularly, the present invention relates to accepting and processing emotive intelligence in Internet and E-commerce applications.
2. Background
Emotions and computers have, almost from the inception of these devices, been diametrically opposed concepts. Where computers calculate, humans reason. Reasoning has the emotive component that has heretofore evaded computer models and theories. Feelings are separate and different from thinking and vice versa. The intellect has little tolerance for the irrational. Emotions are accepted as a human shortfall in intellectual character. Even in areas such as law, the legal mind is taught to avoid inflaming the passions of the jury. The scientific teaching is to use cold logic in deducing, deriving and proving valid conclusions. In science, there is little allowance for emotion, as emotions tend to be unique in situation and circumstance, rarely predictable, repeatable or controllable. For these and other reasons, computer programs, communication and software applications have tended to ignore emotions, not the least of which is that they are fleeting and difficult to capture with any fidelity in an electronic format.
WYSIWYG display point & click keyboard interfaces are the current interface for helping us to tell our computer devices and receivers what we want. Not being Keats or Longfellows, most of us are not proficient in expressing feelings in written form, which are nevertheless naturally occurring with verbal communication in face-to-face interactions. Face-to-face communications by way of facial expressions, tone, body language and gestures form over 90% of our communications by some estimates. By and large, our modern interfaces allow only the text into email, web publishing, ecommerce, word processing, PDA/Cell, instant messaging, etc, electronic communications routinely filter out those amazing gestures, facial expressions, inflections and so much more which enable humans to make valid inferences about the true meaning and intent of the words conveyed.
Some studies suggest that of a communication received from a presentation, only 7 percent comprises the verbal or text portion. Therefore, much of the remaining 93% is emotive and non-verbal and is currently systematically filtered out through the device interfaces, mostly by point & click or typed text input. Because emotions are fleeting, spontaneous, unique to each individual, and ethereal to capture, technology in this area has not had much progress with the man-machine interface (MMI). Furthermore, emotions have been historically intellectually and culturally, technology's antithesis. Consequently, what is on a user's “mind” rarely makes it through the current electronic interface of most devices.
Electronic communication, at even the lowest levels, have “check sums” built in but these techniques have not been applied at the highest level of the communication. Thus a distorted or inferior signal yields ambiguous meanings, non-intended messages and erosion of relationships that increasingly depend on electronic communication via electronic applications.
MMI has in the past and is presently being studied and labs are busy trying to capture emotions through an interface because the potential benefits from capturing and exploiting emotive input is so great. The present methods are too imprecise to be of much value, but nevertheless used by determined users with emocons and emoticons. Finally, Al has been promising us more intelligent computers but with the exception of some Sci-Fi movies, has not addressed the emotional component of human intelligence for a multitude of reasons, which has led to Al's big failure. What are needed are interfaces that enable users to submit their feelings along with their textual messages, as they would ordinarily do in communicating with somebody standing nearby or face-to-face.
Textual communication, by its very nature can be ambiguous or obscure because of the multiple meanings in language. Emotive content from gestures, facial expressions, body language, and such have been used in conjunction with words to transmit meaning in language. Emotions are mostly absent with modern communication relying on text to carry the message. However, emotive content is used to focus the text and words onto the intended meaning out of a number of possible alternative inferences. Methods for embedding emotive content by a sender have been developed; see US Patent Application '624 from above Reference Section. These methods can be used to add emotive content by both graphical and textual mean. When emotive content is purely textual, understanding is further complicated for reasons such as imprecision in emotive intensity or ambiguity for lack of a more complete description of the emotive state. If emotive content is presented graphically, complexity is increased because the receiver is subjected to overtly emotional component much harder to ignore and impossible to decipher. Here, the receiver must “search themselves for an answer” or understanding. As it is now, the receiver cannot take advantage of computers to generate complete messages. Messages which ordinary human behavior and psychological principles are used to unravel the intended meaning in responding to received verbal messages. Hence, an entire band of communication lies dormant and unused in textual communication, oftentimes leaving little understood and counter-acting communications. What are needed are models and methods of processing emotive intelligence in electronic applications that enable the emotional intelligence dimension.
Emotive Intelligence
By reading an individual's heart or understanding their intent, motivation, action threshold and adapting programming to fit the individual's specific need, Internet models and software applications can use Emotive Intelligence (El). El is the underlying gut feeling, present intent, meaning, impetus, and motivation that automatically and uncontrollably occur in individuals without their conscious direction.
Individuals use Emotive Intelligence (El) to make most decisions and initiate most actions. All feeling, intent, meaning, impetus, and motivation are contained in the El. Therefore an understanding and knowledge of an individual's mental state will disambiguate and clarify wants or needs, if intense to sufficient thresholds will prompt actions. Since many of these are well known, these actions can be anticipated from knowing the individual's mental state.
Psychologists have labeled the emotional decision making, X-brain, for the experiential brain, as distinguished from the R-brain, the rational part. The R-brain is the serial thinking brain that we use to process certain information and ideas through conscious effort. The X-brain is a parallel processor, which takes information from physical sensors, biochemical reactions, biochemistry, historical data stored in emotion memories, etc, and processes without conscious effort automatically producing a feeling resulting from the myriad of sensations that are received. We use emotional intelligence in every day face-to-face interactions. However, current computer device interfaces block all non-verbal communication, allowing mostly textual communication. Therefore currently, electronic processing, programming and communication streams only accommodate rational thinking R-brain functions. Support for the X-brain functions and hence intelligence is non-existent. What are needed are X-brain support functions for electronic processing and communications.
Internet services and product providers are added daily. To effectively find customers, vendors must know an individual customers “heart” or their specific feeling regarding the service needed or required to fulfill desires. Current attempts to capture emotive content use physical sensors, probes, blood pressure, sweat production, breathing, voice recognition and processing, prosodic, video processing/analysis, and other devices and methods. Usable models have not emerged and the Affective programming area is still in its infancy. A customers feeling or even what constitutes a feeling, is the mystery element which would allow programming to accommodate the individual, instead of probabilistic and statistical methods that attempt to use past user actions and demographics in lieu of specific individual needs and desires. For this reason, current methods are generally not determinative in ascertaining the individual's intent, needs, or motivations.
Alternatively, another knowing an individuals mental state can free the individual to have others make unsolicited offers to fill needs wants and desires, even anticipating an individual's actions to fill these him or her self. We currently do this daily when we complain or express feelings, knowing that this will elicit an offer of service from a friend, that service or act to alleviate the pain of the complaint or share in the pleasure of the expressed feeling. What is needed are electronic applications that can extend the area anticipated satisfaction of feelings to the Internet, which provides a universe of services and products looking to fill needs wants and desires.
State of the art attempts to infer, calculate or decipher an individual's mental state on a particular subject by sensors or other external devices has not been effective in bridging the gulf between individuals and vendors. Statistical methods have been tried but fall short. However, enabling the user to enter their own known mental state, with the knowledge that service will be much enhanced and actions anticipated from needs inherent in the Emotive Intelligence (El) provided, may prompt the user to take advantage by registering their mental state in connection with a particular subject or just their general mental state. The alternative is the present state of the art, having individuals consciously determining what they want and then attempting to find the service to satisfy the need, all through point and click interfaces.
The challenge is problematic, because emotions and mental states are complex, and nearly impossible to predict. However, individuals can introspect to discover his or her own feelings regarding prompted subject matter or feelings regarding themselves. Moreover, just like a well known friend observing an individual, applications applying an individuals feelings for inputs, can anticipate needs and enable sponsors, websites, providers and vender products and services to be customized to specific individuals by simply eliciting for the mental state or accepting a given mental states. Since El does not require label identification, anonymity can be preserved without affecting transactions. Thus what are needed are methods of accepting mental states into an application, and processing those inputs using emotional intelligent models and techniques.
Emotional Changes
Few things are as captivating, interesting or intriguing, as individuals emotional or status change. Although highly studied and taught in the artistic fields, this area has largely been ignored in electronic applications, other than to record and playback what actors performed. Moreover, this area of emotional intelligence is fraught with untapped resources and few methods or tools are available for electronic devices to process this information. What is needed are ways to import emotive conditions through electronic interfaces and use the emotive intelligence inherent in and similar to our own human processing, in enhancing electronic applications. The field of Artificial Intelligence has largely ignored emotive intelligence and so has failed to bring us computers and computer applications, which can use common sense or reason. Emotive intelligence is a vital component of common sense and reasoning, going beyond what binary or multi-valued logic can provide. What are needed are methods that provide the tools, structures and algorithms that enable the use of combining emotive illogic and cognitive logic.
Emotive Response
Emotive content carries the invisible dimension in intelligence, artificial and otherwise. There are many philosophies and ways of understanding and misunderstanding emotive intelligence. This makes computer models and applications that much more difficult to develop into a cohesive and consistent implementable programming models. Some of the challenge is currently handled statistically or with sophisticated demographics based methods, accessing disparate sources and obtaining facts collected in large databases, to derive and attempt to predict customer needs for positive responses.
An emerging branch of computer science called Affective programming attempts to apply emotive intelligence in electronic applications. However, Affective programs and models are at their infancy stages and struggle with cultural and technological deficiencies. What are needed are consistent and cohesive models that can be converted into software and used in electronic applications to increase their intelligence, ease of processing key parameters, and reduce the need for statistical guessing. What are needed are methods of anticipating buy-sell transactions that are more direct, have less guessing and more direct cause-effect relationships.
A problem encountered in some emotive intelligence models is the diversity of teachings on the subject, such that a clean all encompassing model is unavailable. Some teach that there are good and bad emotions, positive or negative. Some teach that there is a Devine Law that governs emotions and that they must be controlled. Some teach that we have no business manipulating others through their mental states; some that emotions are personal and private and should never see the light of a transistor. What are needed are clear models, not clouded with value judgments, not based on negative or positive emotions, not subjective, misapplied rules and concepts. What are needed are ways and methods to harness emotive intelligence as we generally apply this in ever day physical interactions. By adding this intelligence to applications, the applications range is extended and functionality increased to provide the untapped resource of human energy and driving force electronically emulating many of our actions and behavior carrying emotive intelligence. What are needed are ways to obtain, process and use emotive intelligence in games, email, ecommerce, PDAs/cells, Operating Systems and Interfaces, etc, to enhance and improve their functionality using El.
Requirements and Challenge of Future Interface
To be more effective and conducive to humans, the electronic device interface of the future must be richer in receiving user input and smarter at giving programming direction. One solution is to allow the interface to somehow read ones mind on command, or feel one's pulse as in a lie detector and some accompanying guess. People are ruled not only by cold logic but also by emotion. What are needed are systems and methods that enable access to users emotions, intent, motivation and hence to read the mind. The emotive content layer is a missing dimension in device interfaces and electronic communication in general. What is needed is technology that enables the emotive content layer without strapping electrodes and wires to users.
These are steep challenges but the payoff is enormous because once emotive objects are recognized and encapsulated by the interface, the system then has much more of the information regarding what a friend is saying, how well a search is going, a consumer's desires, wants, preferences, when they will make a decision, how/why a decision is reached, etc. What is needed is an interface that can grasp and encapsulate emotive properties, providing computer programmers the means to make non-linear interactive software programs and computer applications that are adaptive and customized to individuals. What is needed are tools that are non-linear, allowing the programming to make leaps and judgments not possible without many database demographics, probabilities and statistics or lengthy point & click streams. What are needed are adaptive algorithms able to change search strategies based on emotive content, progressively improving through subsequent emotive inputs. What is needed is an emotive content accommodating interface that can:                1) Enrich the interface input stream without over-burdening users,        2) Dynamically customize users input to users universe of content with request urgency and timeliness of response parameters,        3) Present the user with reasonable individual choices based on needs without prompting, as well as establish better defaults, automatic preferences, and options        4) Control the users environment to affect the comfort or resolution of the users needs without a lengthy dialog with a dumb interface,        5) Offer sponsors, vendors or providers of content better customer needs, wants, intent, motivation identification methods and distribution systems to satisfy those specific needs, wants, and desires        6) Ease the programming burden by working with robust emotive data objects instead of complex guess-work algorithms from tenuous models.        
What is needed is:                1) Emotive input elicited from the user through emotive objects which capture the full set of emotions,        2) A standard format for the transmission of precise emotive content which can be embedded in text, audio and video application streams        3) Encapsulated emotive objects, data structures and transmission format allowing processing and a standard emotive content interface paradigm        4) Software engineering of an emotive content layer without resorting to by-guess inputs and by-gosh output options producing complex queries in prioritizing search results or eCommerce opportunities.Artificial Emotive Intelligence (AEI)        
Most current computer applications can benefit from the added dimension of El, the obvious ones are eCommerce, future OS, Web Publishing, E-mail and Instant Messaging, polling, polling and reporting continuously and without interpretation or analysis of polling results, PDAs-Cell phone and instant messaging interfaces, Set-Top Box interfaces, Applications requiring Measurable Emotive Feedback, Voting systems, Decision-making tools, Advertising, Complaint Desk, Games and appliance interfaces with personalities. Many more applications can use the missing dimension of El and one has only to name one before uses can be found for emotive intelligence.
E-Commerce Applications
e-Customer attitudes, behaviors and preferences all stem from customer emotional makeup. People buy emotionally, not intellectually and those vendors that are astute and respond to hidden cues stand to gain a competitive advantage. Website owners operators and service or product providers are interested in on-line shopping behavior, brand loyalty, winning and keeping customers, anticipating customer needs because consumers can change vendors on a whim and they are very hard to win back. Vendors need to obtain basic emotional information on the consumer purchase decision cycle in real-time on-line. While present methods of doing this are expensive, time consuming and produce debatable results, what are needed are immediate measurable emotive satisfaction feedback which can be used adaptively on-line to customize the website for each individual user. Like mathematics, emotions are a universal language. Regardless of language, race, national origin or religion, most understand the emotive language basics. We grow to understand it early and quickly. Emotions are the big component of negotiations and business transactions. What is needed are ways to allow devices and electronic communication to provide the vehicle to better use these for satisfying customers and more quickly identifying unique customer needs to provider entities most likely to service those needs.
Web Publishing Applications
Publishing software makers require better more efficient and new ways of expressing or obtaining information through web interfaces. Emotive content provides a rich source of web publishing software structures and tools for eliciting emotive input from users and tools for using El in adaptively altering web content or better connecting with customized services.
E-mail and Instant Messaging Applications
Users of email currently, with some emails, have emoticons available, which they can insert into their transmissions. The old fashion method of words is available but prohibitively expensive on time and writing skill. The majority of us still put together an email message in too big a hurry to re-read for spelling, much less insert textual representative feelings to better describe the subject matter. Feelings, which ordinarily carry most of the El information in fact-to-face contact, color the textual message with user intent and motivation. The emotional portion gives the message understanding, relationship, context and life. What is needed are tools to enable users to embed precise feelings quickly into text, as we all do currently in face to face contacts with facial expression, voice tone, and body language.
Index of Emotive Indicators
The Nobel Prize in economics in 2002 went to a psychologist, Dr. Daniel Kahneman, who helped pioneer the field of behavioral finance. Kahnemen persuasively argued that investors are irrational. But more than that, he showed that we are predictably irrational. Thus feelings are at the very foundation of our economic understanding, yet are under employed.
Turning to some economic conundrums, will foreigners continue to buy massive amounts of US government debt? Will short-term rates go to x.y % by this year? Can ten-year rates stay flat with a spread of only z % between the short-term rate and ten year bonds? Will the economy once again grow through the trend of 2-2.5%? Will the trade deficit grow or subside? Will the savings rate stay abysmal? Will the dollar drop or inflation rise? Will the government's deficits still top $300 billion? Will gold prices rise?
Are the central banks of the world going to keep plowing money into US bonds at an even bigger pace in 2005? Will long term rates stay flat? Will the yield curve flatten by this summer? Would the Fed continue to raise/lower rates, and risk an inverted yield curve? Would anyone buy a ten-year bond for a lousy extra 1% and then risk what goes with it? Is the US going into recession? Will long-term rates start to rise?
Historically, the Fed keeps on raising rates, with perhaps a pause or two, until it gets to at least 4%. Once the Feds get started, they do not stop until there is some pain. Since the signals of “economic pain” tend to lag, it is quite possible the Fed tightens too much before it stops. The reason for the lag is that most economic data is a few months old before anybody can get it, or even establish an actual trend.
That is not good for bonds, and it is not a good environment for credit spreads. When credit spreads are “tight” it indicates that the difference between a government bond and other bonds is historically very low. And by tight, the meaning is no room, or very little, to get any tighter. When interest rates are so low, investors look for any place to get higher yields. If they pour into high yield bonds, corporate bonds, and emerging market debt, the yield on those bonds relative to government debt has to come down, making it a fairly risky proposition for those playing the spread game. The Fed will continue to raise rates until the economy shows signs of trouble. While the Fed in the past has been willing to cause a recession, they are on the seesaw between worrying about inflation and creating another speculative economy with interest rates too low and the concern that raising rates too much will squeeze the growth out of an economy that has grown addicted to, if not dependant upon low interest rates. If long-term rates do not rise, the Fed will stop sooner than 4% because they will not create an inverted yield curve on their own.
These are all market forecast questions and issues, and people making decisions need to know what consumers, government officials, bankers, etc are feeling. After all, the market can be irrational longer than you or I can remain solvent.
Polling is the current state of the art in ascertaining people's expectations, confidence and feelings. A current polling solution is made for characteristic data figures of merit in economic activities and an index of those factors for indications of where the economy is going. However, this approach is based on circumstances and information that is reflective of economic activity, activity that is time consuming to extract, secondary and tertiary in causation, and not fundamental to feelings or even on the nations pulse. Moreover, lags in this knowledge cause immense problems because much is at stake and stale data is bad data. Counting all the ifs and buts is revealing on just how badly money managers and authorities need to know how confident, scarred, fearful, angry, interested, relieved, suspicions, withdrawn, optimistic, aggressive, cautious, anxious, etc certain populations are at anytime. What are needed are ways that this data can be acquired in real-time continuously by simply monitoring communication data streams for emotive content anonymously. Eliciting this for this data expressly can also provide sample data representative of any demographic. What are needed are software products to accomplish the extraction of leading emotive indexes from data in specific areas of economic or financial activity. These can be had by continuous real-time emotive-content monitoring of communication streams for the nation's “pulse” and other vital signs.
Voice-Mail Applications
Individuals are turning to applications of emotive content in phone applications. At least one such system, Emotive Alert, labels messages according to the caller's tone of voice to identify which messages are the most urgent. The software system might be installed at the phone exchange or in an intelligent answering machine, where it will listen to incoming messages and send the recipient a text message along with an emoticon indicating whether the message is urgent, happy, excited or formal. As machines and devices do more and more, emotional intelligence must be introduced so that software can serve us better. Currently, these external means to bring in emotive intelligence are limited, not cohesive, making them islands without bridges to connect these kinds of applications with other applications.
Machines and Appliances with Personalities
Home networks will eventually establish connectivity between humans and most major appliances in the home. If you believe the SciFi movies or futurologists, many of these devices will eventually have voice input/output interfaces. Rather than the Steven Hawking robotic voice, text streams with emotive content and prosodic interfaces can give machines personalities and a human quality currently only dreamed of by visionaries but currently a reality via emotive layer enhanced text streams bound for prosodic voice I/O interfaces. What is needed are emotive standards which can tie emotive inputs from voice recognition devices to El processing methods and then to emotive output prosodic interface devices. Appliances with personalities and home networks that are attuned to the occupant's feelings, physical, emotional and cognitive can be fed streams of emotive embedded text streams. This frees up users to interact with and understand machines naturally, rather than constantly adjusting machines to stay comfortable, safe, and well maintained.
PDAs-Cell Phone, Instant Messaging Interfaces
These devices all have displays, which can use the emotive interface and transmission capability to enrich communication and provide smarter services. These can be exploited in verbalizing text or email messages with the appropriate emotive inflections for aural interpretation, making communication richer and more versatile.
Set-Top Box Interfaces
The TV of tomorrow is here today but with the same point and click interface of yesterday. What is needed is a box that can receive a simple emotive instruction, “Computer, I'm feeling very cold” and that command should command the home heating system to increase the temperature setting 5, 10, 15 degrees depending on the intensity of the feeling, without forcing the individual to log into the Interactive TV or set top box, click their way to the home-network, choose the furnace and dial in a new temperature setting. Physical sensation is not the only layer of feelings. Personal and social-induced feelings should be handled as well. Where the feelings are pain producing, actions to reduce the pain could be automatically taken or options offered for such. Where the feelings are pleasurable, these can be used to share with friends or even actions to maintain or increase the pleasure feelings can be offered as smart options. In either case, the Operating System (OS) becomes much more intelligent at anticipating a users point and click input, doing much of the non-creative but informative “thinking” by way of instant searches for options, and allowing the user to more quickly decide on action which would otherwise take him much longer or never reach that alternative.
Google currently provides a cell-phone service whereby the consumer dials a number on their cell/PDA and all the pizza establishments within a certain radius are identified and phone numbers provided. Application of emotive intelligence would anticipate such needs from the hunger feeling. In a scenario wherein one comes home and issues a command “Computer, I'm feeling extremely hungry”, the home interface application may check a list of favorite meals which can be prepared within the time set for “extremely”, 10-15 minutes, check the refrigerator and cupboards for available ingredients and let consumer know instantly what they have available and a list of restaurants within X radius which can be called beforehand by computer to ascertain wait time or to establish a reservation should that be necessary. This is all that a companion might do in knowing that you are “extremely hungry”, thus this intelligence can also be programmed with the input of feelings.
Scenarios like the above abound. As the Internet grows in limitless ways and services are all out looking for ways to satisfy consumer needs, but currently mostly using passive advertising or random spam or spam-like methods. The myriad options available boggle the mind, hence methods are needed to narrow the list of options to find the most likely needed service in the quickest possible time, and fulfill a specific desire for a particular person within the desired time constraint.
Applications Requiring Measurable Emotive Feedback
Psychologists, social workers and therapists need to measure and report client progress. Funding is based on worker showing measurable results of therapy/progress. This is currently and very difficult to assess and record by current methods and requires periodic time-consuming “assessment” reports. Therapists listen and record clients “presenting problem” and elicit the associated emotive content on the presenting problem. This is the initial state. What is needed to simplify and structure the progress reporting is upon termination or periodically, the presenting problem emotive content is elicited and the emotive displacement or emotive change calculated. Measurable satisfaction or dissatisfaction is then linked to success or failure of therapeutic approach taken, incremental success is measured by increase in pleasurable emotive intensity or decrease in painful emotive intensity, and incremental ineffectiveness is measured likewise. Methods of eliciting and calculating the emotive metrics are needed.
Decision Facilitation Interfaces
Decision-making programs that account for the emotional element are also likely to be more reasonable than applications and methods using only logic, as logic is binary and one-dimensional in nature. For example decisions could be made not on the probability of an event happening, but on the decision makers emotive disposition regarding a particular subject matter. Since many decisions are made based on insufficient or imperfect information, emotions play a big part, going deep into the subconscious database for a past data point. Decisions made emotively and times “gut feel”, apply a storehouse or database of experiences that is associated with feelings. Applications that elicit precise emotive content with issues, criteria and alternatives, are embedded with emotional content that can be used to derive the least painful, most pleasurable or most favorable solution, resolving many conflicts which must be weighted or just. Methods are needed to elicit, extract, combine and formulate results from the feelings space in decision-making processes, which most closely model human decision-making. This would enable machines and appliances to act more “reasonably” and to be more “human” without sacrificing their functionality and usefulness.
Voting Interfaces
Voter systems that allow emotive choices concerning issues and or candidates, are more likely to provide the true choices on issues than the current “forced” binary yes/no choice systems. For example, apathy is a neutral emotion, which is not often a factor because voters are not motivated to expend the effort to vote. Since emotions are the major underlying motive for voting and can be ascertained easily through emotive objects, mass profiling of emotive input can be used to resolve issues on the most fundamental of levels, the peoples feelings.
Encryption-Decryption Streams
Most streams currently need some sort of privacy assurance. Emotive objects provide additional elements/tokens from which ciphers can be based and which are perhaps easier to key on. Keys can be easier because emotive may be more deeply embedded in memory and more likely to be event based. Combinations of emotions as well as emotion profiles can be used for encryption-decryption of data streams.
Overcoming “Click Fraud” in Online Advertising
Thousands of merchants currently pay for click stream directed to their website, paying as much as $50 per click. Many of these are being victimized by “click fraud” which are bogus streams generated by fruitless traffic from scammers paid to generate clicks on a website with no intention of ever buying anything. Although search engine providers issue refunds for these types of fraud, fraudulent clicks frequently exceed spending limits and knock ads out of the display rotation. They also don't compensate merchants for missed sales opportunities.
Search engines such as Google's have implemented auction advertising links and many other business models are now emerging which allow search engines to be more and bigger market place advertisers. This advertising market is expected to grow to $7.4 billion by 2008, but is threatened by “click fraud”.
In face-to-face sales, a seller searched the buyer's face to discover the emotions, motivations and attitude of the buyer, upon which he can trust in negotiations, price, risk of non-payment, etc. This is currently not possible in eCommerce and Internet transactions. Emotive objects provide a way to access user emotive content, and programmably use this information as a real live seller would do in understanding the buyers motivation and intent to purchase, and what the buyer is truly motivated to purchase.
Accessing users emotive content, would give websites a way to programmably filter those with serious intent and potential to purchase over those that are just clicking for mischief. Albeit, as in real life, there will be “actors” who will attempt to circumvent or gain advantage through emotional tactics but there are also those users who will just be genuinely interested in quicker unique service, customizable products/services and more reliable results. Making tests like the Solomon Test is doable with emotive objects as the emotive state and intensity are available parameters and decisions can be based or driven by any programming complexity desired.
Complaint Desk
Whether complaints come over a network or face-to-face contact, the emotions of the consumer will drive his/her need for a satisfactory solution. This is called “straightening feathers” and almost entirely depends on satisfying the emotional perturbation stressing a consumer of a product or service. At times the solution consists solely of a de-escalation of initial emotive intensity. At times the emotive state and intensity can drive the solution options, i.e., a highly emotionally intense individual is likely to require more time and attention than an individual with less of an intense reaction. Another, perhaps seeking a small token of compensation for the deficiency, rather than an individual with personal issues misdirecting an emotion would be handled differently. Therefore, knowledge of the magnitude and type of the emotional content will reveal the work required to achieve equilibrium or the solution that generally brings about a satisfactory result. Also knowing the emotive state, oft times very apparent in face-to-face contact, if not dealt with, serves only to exacerbate the painful feelings of consumer/client who may return in another less manageable form. The beginning of any solution will require the grievance stated and associated emotional content because a good solution will require that both be satisfied. What are needed are ways to calculate satisfaction from emotional circumstances.
Game Applications
Most games currently carry very few emotional states, hate or fear among the dominant. These motivate the players to kill, maim, injure or otherwise wreak havoc to score points either in offense or self-defense measures. Although wildly successful, the most common complaint is that they lack intelligence or options for different strategies beyond the obvious linear brut-force mentality. While providing excitement of a salable game, there are other markets, which are left out, the girls market for example, or users who would think like to think more strategically or users who want a more “satisfying” victory. Also, the games can become boring because of the lack of dimensionality, kill or be killed being the only goals. For example, the introduction of the emotional dimension into most games, would add complexity, intelligence and options to grow the game itself. Character auto response and character decision-making actions would provide additional options and strategic directions.
Hence the emotive intelligence component can become a strategic element which would make the game “deeper” than a straight shoot'emup, yet retain fun by virtue of giving the player the option of always going back to the brut-force play, the mindless killing and violence. Thus, what are needed are more “intelligent” games.